NEWTON REALIZES THE MOON IS FALLING

Newton thought about motion and its causes. He realized what Galileo taught: an
object tends to stay in motion (moving in the same speed and direction) unless a force acts
on it. Galileo had considered mainly motions in one direction. Newton noticed that it also
requires a force to change the direction of a moving object. As far as I know, Newton was
the first to realize that. Before Galileo, people thought that objects needed some kind of
internal “force” to keep moving–left alone they would stop. After Galileo, they realized
that an object moving in a straight line would keep moving unless something stopped it.
But they seem to have not realized that if something that was not moving in a straight line
(such as a planet or moon), it must be because something is pushing on it at right angles
to the motion. That was Newton’s first key idea, but it was still qualitative.
Applying this idea to the motions of the planets around the sun, he realized that there
must be a force directed towards the sun (and not tangentially!). Similarly, the moon goes
around the Earth, so there must be a force pulling it (or pushing it) towards the Earth.
It was known that the moons of Jupiter revolved around Jupiter, so there must be an
attraction between Jupiter and its moons, too. Thus the force that kept the planets in
orbit was pointed towards the sun, not tangentially. Before Galileo, people (supposedly)
thought that angels pushed the planets to keep them from stopping–those pushes had
to be tangential. But Newton realized that the force had to be radial. So perhaps it
had something to do with the sun. Newton knew Kepler’s laws, and was a good enough
mathematician to deduce from Kepler’s laws that if there was a force it had to be radial,
and it had to obey an inverse-square law. But what could that force be?
Sometime in 1666, the idea struck Newton: maybe that force that pulls the moon is the
same force that pulls objects (such as the proverbial apple) to the ground. Indeed, maybe
everything attracts everything else!
John Conduitt, Newton’s assistant at the royal mint and husband of Newton’s niece,
had this to say about the event when he wrote about Newton’s life:
In the year 1666 he retired again from Cambridge . . . to his mother in
Lincolnshire and while he was musing in a garden it came into his thought
that the power of gravity (which brought an apple from a tree to the ground)
was not limited to a certain distance from earth, but that this power must
extend much further than was usually thought. Why not as high as the
Moon thought he to himself and that if so, that must influence her motion
and perhaps retain her in her orbit, whereupon he fell a-calculating what
would be the effect of that superposition.
Newton himself described his discovery as follows:
From Kepler’s rule of the periodical times of the Planets being in sesquial-
terate proportion of their distances from the center of their Orbs,I deduced
1
2 NEWTON REALIZES THE MOON IS FALLING

that the forces which keep the Planets in theirOrbs must be reciprocally as
the squares of their distances from the centers about which they revolves:
and thereby compared the force required to keep the Moon in her Orb with
the force of gravity at the surface of the Earth, and found them answer
pretty nearly. All this was in the plague years of 1665-66. For in those days
I was in the prime of my age for invention . . ..
What was Newton calculating? He calculated the amount the Moon actually falls in one
second (from the size of its orbit and the length of the month), and then calculated how
far it should fall if it is falling just like an apple, but obeying an inverse-square law. Would
the answers come out the same? Check it for yourself below.
Isaac Newton was 24 years old when he made that calculation.

Check the math yourself

The Moon doesn’t get any closer to the Earth by falling, because the Moon is also moving
sideways, and as it falls, the Earth’s surface curves away beneath it. Let us calculate how
far the moon falls in one second.
The moon takes about 29 days to go around the Earth once. To find out how many
seconds that is, we multiply 60 × 60 × 24 × 29 = 2505600 seconds. The moon is about
30 Earth diameters away from Earth (as measured using solar eclipses). Let us take 8000
miles for the diameter of Earth; then how far does the moon travel per month? That would
be 2π × 240000 = 1507964 miles. Dividing we find that the moon travels sideways
1507964
x= = 0.64 miles = 3380 feet
2358720
Now how far does it fall in one second? Let that distance be s. Let D be the diameter of
the moon’s orbit; so that is twice 240,000 miles, or 480,000 miles.

Figure 1 illustrates the situation, greatly exaggerating the distance the Moon moves in
one second. By similar triangles we have
x D−s
= .
s x
But s is negligible compared to D so we have almost exactly
x D
=
s x
2
which gives us s = x /D. That is
x2
s =
D
x 0.64
= x = 3380 miles
D 480000
= 0.0045 feet
= 0.05 inches
 NEWTON REALIZES THE MOON IS FALLING 3

Figure 1. The moon starts at A. In one second it moves to B, falling

a distance s while moving horizontally a distance x. The diameter of the
orbit is D so the vertical side of the big triangle is D − s.
A x
s
b
x
B

Earth b

One-twentieth of an inch. That’s how far the moon falls per second.
Now how far would we expect the Moon to fall if it is acted upon by the same force
that makes apples fall? The moon is 60 times as far from the center of the Earth as the
apple; let us suppose the Earth attracts the apple as if all the mass was concentrated at
the center. Then we would expect the force on the Moon to be smaller by a factor of 602 ,
which is 3600. We know that the apple falls 21 gt2 = g/2 feet on Earth; since g = 32 that is
16 feet, or 192 inches. if g goes down by a factor of 3600, the Moon should fall 0.053 inches
in one second. One-twentieth of an inch. As Newton said, the two calculations “answer
pretty nearly.”

References
[1] Keesing, R. G., The History of Newton’s apple tree, Contemporary Physics 39, 377–91, 1998.